I work with around 30 small teams a year as a coach and consultant, mostly UK SMEs (8–80 people) and US startups at similar scale. The “what PM tool should we use?” question gets asked constantly, and the wrong answer usually comes from a feature comparison rather than a workflow understanding.
Below are the 7 tools I’ve watched real small teams use, what each is genuinely good at, and where each one falls apart at scale.
Notion — best for knowledge-heavy teams
Cost: Free for personal; £8/user/month for Team. Best for: consultancies, agencies, knowledge work.
Notion’s strength is the merger of docs, databases, and projects in one place. For 5–25 person knowledge teams, the ability to write project briefs, link them to task databases, and embed everything in a shared wiki is powerful. The weakness: it’s slow at high volumes (1000+ tasks), and the freedom to structure things any way you like can become “no team uses it the same way.”
Best fit: consultancies, content teams, founder-led startups under 30 people.
ClickUp — best for process-driven teams
Cost: Free tier; £6/user/month for Unlimited; £10/user/month for Business. Best for: operations-heavy teams.
ClickUp is feature-dense — sometimes overwhelmingly so. Its strength is the combination of tasks, docs, goals, time tracking, and dashboards in one tool. For teams with defined repeatable processes (e.g., marketing agencies with similar client workflows), the templates and automations save real hours.
Downside: the UI can feel cluttered, and onboarding takes 2–4 weeks before people actually use it well.
Linear — best for engineering teams
Cost: Free for up to 250 issues; $8/user/month for Standard. Best for: software engineering teams.
If your team ships code, Linear is the answer. The keyboard-first interface, clean issue model, and GitHub integration make it genuinely faster than Jira or Asana for engineering work. Adoption among engineering teams is unusually strong — I’ve watched teams convert from Jira to Linear in a week.
Less useful for cross-functional teams or non-engineering work.
Asana — best for cross-functional ops teams
Cost: Free tier; £8/user/month for Starter; £18/user/month for Advanced. Best for: ops, marketing, project-driven teams.
Asana’s strength is the multiple-view system (list, board, timeline, calendar) and its strong reporting layer. Best for teams running multiple parallel projects with cross-functional dependencies. The “timeline” view is genuinely useful for planning longer-running projects.
Best fit: marketing teams, ops teams, agencies with multiple parallel client projects.
Trello — best for very small or non-technical teams
Cost: Free tier; £5/user/month for Standard. Best for: teams under 8 people, simple workflows.
Trello has been around forever and remains underrated for genuinely simple needs. The Kanban board model is intuitive enough that non-technical teams adopt it in hours. Falls apart for teams over 15 or projects with strong dependencies.
Monday.com — best brand recognition, mixed verdict
Cost: £7–£14/user/month. Best for: non-tech teams who’d otherwise use spreadsheets.
Monday.com sells aggressively and has won many UK SMEs over from spreadsheets. The colour-coded UI is genuinely friendly to non-technical users. The downside: pricing is per-seat and adds up fast, and the platform doesn’t go as deep as ClickUp or Asana for complex workflows.
Basecamp — best for async-first teams
Cost: $15/user/month or $349/month flat for unlimited users. Best for: distributed async teams.
Basecamp’s flat-fee pricing is genuinely refreshing for growing teams. The product design philosophy (favouring async messages over chat, separate spaces for projects) reduces meeting load. The downside: limited feature depth — power users find it too simple after 3–6 months.
How to actually pick
The questions I walk client teams through:
- Is your work knowledge-led or process-led? Knowledge → Notion. Process → ClickUp or Asana.
- Are you primarily an engineering team? If yes, Linear.
- Are you a very small or non-technical team? Trello or Monday.
- Will the team genuinely use it? The fancier tool no-one uses is worse than the simple tool everyone uses.
The tool isn’t the problem
About 70% of the “we need a new PM tool” conversations I have with small teams actually reveal a process problem disguised as a tool problem. Symptoms: unclear ownership, scope creep, no shared definition of done, meetings instead of written updates. None of these are fixable by changing tools.
Before switching tools, try:
- One owner per project, written down
- One status update per week, written, async
- One agreed definition of done
- One source of truth for priorities
If those fix the symptoms, the tool wasn’t the issue.
Switching cost is real
Migrating PM tools costs 2–6 weeks of team productivity. Don’t switch lightly. Don’t switch more than once every 18 months. The marginal feature win is almost always smaller than the migration cost.
Related reading
For broader productivity stack, see the best productivity apps for knowledge workers. For AI-specific tools, the best AI productivity tools in 2026. And to introduce new tools without team resistance, how to build a habit that sticks applies to teams too.
FAQ
Q: Notion vs ClickUp — which for a 15-person team?
Notion if knowledge-heavy (lots of docs and references). ClickUp if process-heavy (lots of similar recurring tasks).
Q: Should we use Jira?
Only for engineering teams over ~40 people or in regulated environments. Linear is better for most modern small engineering teams.
Q: What about Microsoft Project / Microsoft Planner?
Planner is fine if you already live in Microsoft 365. Project is overkill for small teams.
Q: Do we need PM tooling at all if we’re under 10 people?
Yes — but Trello or a shared Notion page is enough. Don’t over-tool.
Q: How much should a small team spend on PM tooling?
Roughly 0.5–2% of headcount cost. For a 10-person UK team (~£700K total cost), £3K–£14K/year is the realistic range.
